Time and again, the AMC has come up with tax collecting drives, but the result has been pretty disappointing. During a recent drive, the civic body managed to recover a paltry sum on Rs 14 lakh in a day where as many as nine dedicated teams of tax collectors were deployed in an upmarket area of the city.

The civic body is also facing shortage of manpower in the tax collection department. This is also restricting the AMC from reaching out to large number of unidentified or undervalued properties in the city. According to sources in the AMC, the civic body cannot afford to implement mega drives especially if the recovery is below certain level.

The AMC also announced another tax recovery drive - targeting commercial and residential properties - but on Saturday, Vasant Nikam, in-charge of tax recovery department informed that the drive was put on hold.

"Despite deploying a huge team of tax collectors, our collection was quite low and thus we do not wish to carry it forward. Such drives involve many officers and employees and our routine work gets disturbed. We are now looking at adopting different ways to increase our tax collection figures but it may take some time," he said.

"We have put the tax collection drive on hold because of the ongoing festive season. However, the routine tax collection is going on without interruption that has pushed the total property tax collection in the current financial year to Rs 41 crore till Saturday," he added.